Former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney predicted people who are ideologically aligned with President Trump will move on from Trump himself amid widespread condemnation of the president over last week’s violent riots at the U.S. Capitol.
“I think the ideas will live on. The ideas of the Republican Party are bigger than one man, but I think if you have any role at all in what happened on Wednesday that you sort of, you don’t deserve to lead the party anymore,” Mulvaney said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “The ideas are bigger than the people, but I think the voters will take that into consideration.”
Mulvaney, who resigned last week as U.S. envoy to Northern Ireland, added that Trump supporters have broad overlap with the Tea Party movement, which elected Mulvaney to Congress in 2010.
“I can’t tell you the number of people who’ve supported me for a decade who are saying that Wednesday was a bridge too far,” he said. “They love Trump, they love the policies, they were really pleased with the successes of the first four years, but he lost them on Wednesday. And I think that’s the right thing. I think people need to know that what happened on Wednesday is just different.”
Mulvaney also defended pulling his support from the president following the riot as opposed to after earlier widely condemned moments such as Trump’s comments to Billy Bush, which led Mulvaney to call Trump a “terrible human being.”
“That’s different. Policy differences are different. Stylized, stylistic differences are different. Things you don’t like about a person’s personalities are different than what happened on Wednesday,” Mulvaney said. “Wednesday was a fundamental threat to the United States.”